A Fist Full of Rupees

I love video game parodies. I love seeing what humor gamers will find from a loved (or not) franchise and how they run with it. Parodies such as game comics, written out recaps of the game, but most through video. Enter YouTube, a hive of scum and villainy, and hundreds if not thousands of videos dealing with gaming. From tongue in cheek reviews to let’s plays to remixes of a video game theme, it’s there.

Some fans even create full on movies doing animated tributes. Some film a live action version of their game. Shot by shot remasters even. And then you get ‘A Fist Full of Rupees.’ This movie wasn’t just a homage to the Legend of Zelda series, but was a mix of a spaghetti western classic, ‘A Fist Full of Dollars.’ A '60s western cowboy classic, this movie made Italian based western movies the thing to see for U.S. theater goers. Gritty and full of colorful and gruff characters, it packed a legendary story that many to this day enjoy.

So, someone decided to mix this legendary western with this legendary game franchise and bam, you have Link in a gritty western setting. Zelda as the mysterious dame running the town (and the more mysterious Sheik), Navi is the obnoxious girl well… being obnoxious, Ganon as the leader of a band of thugs looking for a treasure and Link being the mute survivor of a raid by Ganon’s thugs, all searching for this treasure and revenge.

It takes western tropes to its extreme and enjoys peppering the movie with nods to the games, including background props, the line the old man at the beginning mutters at the very beginning, to intentionally cutting the film into three parts to mimic the three pieces of the tri-force. It is indeed a fun, even cheesy (those fight scenes) crossover.